The New York Times

It’s easy to imagine how a novelist might use a real person as a basis for a fictional character. It’s equally easy to imagine how such a person could notice the similarities and perhaps become offended. After all, the fiction writer has pledged an oath to serve a calling higher than mere feelings. Why should […]

By Peter Duffy Few baseball fields can boast the history of the tattered diamond with the poured concrete grandstand in the northern reaches of Crotona Park in the Bronx. In the 1920s, Hank Greenberg, who became a Hall of Famer playing most of his career with the Detroit Tigers, would walk over from his home […]

By Peter Duffy In 1986, at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in New York, Joe Reddick was an 18-year-old drug dealer fueled, he says, by “envy, jealousy and greed.” Known by the street name of Black, Mr. Reddick set up operations in a small apartment building at 1839 University Avenue in the Morris […]

By Peter Duffy Seventy-five years ago, in a small village in eastern Ukraine, Daria Schulha Kira recalls huddling with her three siblings as Communist Party officials ransacked their home looking for grain. “Your government needs your food,” she remembers the armed men shouting. “Then they took iron bars and poked in the walls and the […]